CONCLUSION. .^:,7 



room by the side of our own solid and tried ones, which lor 

 ordinary p\n-poses suit us far the best. But we have found 

 that more is needed. Along with a Trade Corporation, 

 designed for the very purpose that foreign banks pursue, 

 we are now to have Credit banks to support and develop 

 our home industry and our export trade. What immense 

 amount of benefit those foreign "Export Banks" have 

 brought to their several countries, more particularly to 

 ever pushing Germany, we have, after long continued 

 incredulity, only lately come to realise. While branches 

 of German banks, confidingly welcomed at first by our 

 financial journalists, ferreted out our own trade secrets at 

 home, to profit by them largely, German " Export Banks " 

 enabled their merchants to fasten their hold like an octopus 

 multiplied a thousandfold upon trade, including our own, 

 in all foreign countries, aye, even in our own colonies, and 

 German capitalists to possess themselves of some of our 

 most valuable and necessary " key industries." And to a 

 great extent it was with our money that they were operating. 

 The admission is candidly made in the Jubilee Memorial 

 of the German Reichshank} which owns that the great 

 banking crashes in 1900 and the following years were the 

 result of our withdrawal of our money, which we 

 then wanted for the South African war, but with which 

 Germany had been carrying on her trade since 1895.- 



Fifteen years ago Mr. Chamberlain would have it, as an 

 argument in support of his proposed Chinese Wall, which 

 was to keep out foreign goods, that the British " old dog," 

 poor decrepit animal that he was, could not be taught 

 " new tricks." He is learning them now by the score and 

 is taking to them very kindly, with every promise of faring 

 well with them. The " dog " is not so old as all that 



yet. 



At all points of our economic and political system are we 

 endeavouring to fix new grafts on the inert old stock. 



^ " Die Reichsbank 1876-1900." Berlin, 1904. 



- I called attention to this in an article on " British and Foreign 

 Banking," which was pnblished in the October number of the 

 Economic Review, in 1905. 



